“It does not bespeak great wisdom to call the film The Bad Lieutenant, and I only agreed to make the film after William (Billy) Finkelstein, the screenwriter, who had seen a film of the same name from the early nineties, had given me a solemn oath that this was not a remake at all. But the film industry has its own rationale, which in this case was the speculation of some sort of franchise.

“I have no problem with this. Nevertheless, the pedantic branch of academia, the so called ‘film studies,’ in its attempt to do damage to cinema, will be ecstatic to find a small reference to that earlier film here and there, though it will fail to do the same damage that academia — in the name of literary theory — has done to poetry, which it has pushed to the brink of extinction.

“Cinema, so far, is more robust. I call upon the theoreticians of cinema to go after this one. Go for it, losers.” — an excerpt of Werner Herzog‘s statement in the Bad Lieutenant press notes, as passed along by The Wrap‘s Eric Kohn.